Top 35 Sophie Hannah Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Weak people always attack strong people – it’s safer. It’s weak people who are dangerous, who lash out uncontrollably and hurt you back. Stong people can walk away – no repercussions, you see, if you attack a stong person.”

— Sophie Hannah

2. “We manufacture anger to give ourselves the illusion of power when we feel weak and helpless.”

— Sophie Hannah

3. “Different people regard rules differently, no matter what those rules happen to be. Mutinous characters like me always resent constraints, even perfectly sensible ones, but there are some who welcome their existence and enforcement because it makes them feel safer. Protected.”

— Sophie Hannah

4. “Cambridge is heaven, I am convinced it is the nicest place in the world to live. As you walk round, most people look incredibly bright, as if they are probably off to win a Nobel prize.”

— Sophie Hannah

5. “I’ve been alone with my thoughts for too long; I’m starting to feel unreal.”

— Sophie Hannah

6. “One ought not to use words carelessly, or even spontaneously. Once they are launched, they cannot be called back.”

— Sophie Hannah

7. “I am a fellow commoner at Lucy Cavendish College. My husband used to be a lecturer at Leeds University, and we lived in Yorkshire for 11 years. When he gave up his job, we realised we could live wherever we liked.”

— Sophie Hannah

8. “No one has been buried at Mill Road Cemetery in Cambridge, England, for many years, and so the place has a shady, overgrown magic about it.”

— Sophie Hannah

9. “If you only have one world, one life, then however brilliant it is most of the time, you have nowhere to run when you need to escape from it for a while.”

— Sophie Hannah

10. “I know better than anyone that sometimes a possibility is enough to keep a person going, even if it never becomes a reality.”

— Sophie Hannah

11. “But we’ll stumble on, she and I, into our messy future. And we’ll have each other.”

— Sophie Hannah

12. “Sometimes, convenience has the appearance of logic.”

— Sophie Hannah

13. “Good sense appears the most underhand of tactics to a man who has no reserves of his own to draw upon.”

— Sophie Hannah

14. “Most crime fiction plots are not ambitious enough for me. I want something really labyrinthine with clues and puzzles that will reward careful attention.”

— Sophie Hannah

15. “Als je eenmaal hebt geaccepteerd dat niemand je ooit zal begrijpen en je hebt dat overweldigende gevoel van eenzaamheid overwonnen, dan heeft het wel iets prettigs, eerlijk gezegd. Jij bent de enige deskundige in je eigen kleine wereldje, en je kunt doen waar je zin in hebt.”

— Sophie Hannah

16. “Lies were lethal, however honourable the intentions of the liar. They deprived people of the opportunity to know the basic facts of their own lives.”

— Sophie Hannah

17. “I like to savor the smell of a garden I cannot see. Do you smell it? The pine, and the lavender – oh, yes, very strongly the lavender. The nose is as important as the eyes. Ask any horticulturist.” Poirot chuckled. “I think that if you and I were to meet the one who created this garden, I would make the more favorable impression upon him.”

— Sophie Hannah

18. “Freddy Mercury’s reflections about supersonic women are making me glad that I’ve never met one: they sound like a bit of a handful – not very easy-going.”

— Sophie Hannah

19. “Seems to me there’s not much time to read about other people’s lives and live your own while you’re at it. If I have to choose, and I reckon I do, I’ll choose living my own life over reading summat about someone else’s.”

— Sophie Hannah

20. “I’m not convinced that stories from real life have beginnings and ends, as a matter of fact. Approach them from any vantage point and you’ll see that they stretch endlessly back into the past and spread inexorably forward into the future. One is never quite able to say “That’s that, then,” and draw a line.”

— Sophie Hannah

21. “You can always, and easily, give somebody the gift of hope and faith, even in the midst of despair.”

— Sophie Hannah

22. “In my opinion, a superior mind counts for nothing unless accompanied by a superior heart.”

— Sophie Hannah

23. “Poirot smoothed his mustache, as if he imagined that laughing might have shaken it out of shape.”

— Sophie Hannah

24. “It is the job of art to replace unhappy true stories with happier inventions.”

— Sophie Hannah

25. “It is hate that makes people kill, Mr Catchpool, not love. Never love. Please be rational.”

— Sophie Hannah

26. “What they’d got was a fat, balding academic who bandied about the phrase “family annihilation”, especially when there were cameras pointed at him, and mentioned the titles of books and articles he’d written to anyone who would listen; who blatantly thought he was the mutt’s nuts, as Sellers had so aptly put it.”

— Sophie Hannah

27. “I always notice the dysfunctional dynamic of human relationships because most places where you encounter it, people are trying to pretend it isnt happening.”

— Sophie Hannah

28. “This is why mysteries are the best kind of stories: because you only get the truth at the very end, when you’re absolutely desperate, and that way of arranging things makes you realize how scarce truth is, in stories and in life, and that it’s really all that matters.”

— Sophie Hannah

29. “I thought to myself that a conversation was a strange thing that could take you almost anywhere. Often you were left stranded miles from where you had started, with no idea about how to get back.”

— Sophie Hannah

30. “The Bible, with all its rules, is simply a book written by a person or people. It ought to carry a disclaimer, prominently displayed: ‘The word of God, distorted and misrepresented by man.”

— Sophie Hannah

31. “I thought to myself, ‘No matter what happens from now on, even if my heart ends up in pieces, this makes it all worth it, this moment.”

— Sophie Hannah

32. “Anyone who cares more about pleasing other people than about their own happiness – anyone who believes, deep down, that everyone else matters more than they do – learns fluent dishonesty at a young age.”

— Sophie Hannah

33. “One cannot do such harm to another and not wound one’s own soul in the process.”

— Sophie Hannah

34. “I will be angry until my dying day, Mr Catchpool. Greater sinners persecuting lesser sinners in the name of morality – that’s something worth raging about.”

— Sophie Hannah

35. “If there’s an aspect of your life that’s making you unhappy and you can escape from it, why wait? Too many people stick around and try to improve things, which often means slogging your guts out to compensate for the deficiencies of others. Personally, I’m a fan of the discard: leave it; move on.”

— Sophie Hannah

36. “If something is in a person’s head, then it is real,” Poirot said.”

— Sophie Hannah

37. “If we never make any changes that scare us at first, we end up missing out.”

— Sophie Hannah

38. “Tell them I’ve two spare rooms here. It might not be as grand as the Bloxham, but everybody’s still alive when they wake up in the morning.”

— Sophie Hannah

39. “Humans, as a rule, were doggedly determined not to believe in the experiences of anyone but themselves.”

— Sophie Hannah